Mandarin is one of five major regional languages of China. It spreads wider than any other regional language, from the whole northern part of China down to Yunnan Province in the southwest corner of China. In that big area there are many regional differences in vocabulary, so somebody who moves from Beijing to Yunnan could not understand people there who were speaking their own language, Yunnanhua. The problem is bigger than for a person in Great Britain or the United States to go to Australia. Therefore, starting in the 1920s, the Chinese government set up a national language based on the Beijing dialect and on the most widely understood words and pronunciations.

Mandarin is a standard language. It is nobody's native language, but a good average between various language forms and a common language everyone can understand and communicate with. Although it is based on the Beijing dialect, it is not the same as Beijing dialect.

In China, the language used in all schools is known as Standard Mandarin, Putonghua (普通话/普通話) meaning "common (spoken) language" or Hanyu (汉语/漢語) meaning "language of the Han“. In places such as Malaysia it is known as Huayu (华语/華語). In Taiwan it is known as Guoyu (国语/國語) meaning "national language." There are some minor differences in these standards.

Mandarin is spoken by over 800 million people around the world, more than any other language. Most people emigrating from the Greater China region now speak Mandarin, while in the past it used to be Cantonese or Taishanese, another local Chinese dialect.

Contents

Mandarin is written with Chinese characters called Hànzì (漢字 or 汉字) which literally means "Han characters". Each Hànzì has its own pronunciation and meaning. An ordinary dictionary will contain about 10,000 characters. Spoken Mandarin uses very many compound words, words that combine meanings the way English does in such terms as "machine gun," "fire truck," "playground," etc.

The Hanzi are ideograms: one character means one idea. The various concepts are derived from the ideograms by combining them. Mandarin can be also written phonetically (that is: written as it is spoken) with the Latin alphabet as you really cannot see the spelling from Hanzi characters. That is called transliteration. The most popular transliteration system is called Pinyin.

Some Chinese characters were originally fairly concrete pictures of the things they represent. As time went on, people chose to write simpler versions that are easier to write but do not look so much like the real thing, just as we sometimes draw stick men rather than drawing people with real-looking bodies, arms, legs, etc. Here are some examples:

Archaic

Seal script

Traditional Modern

Simplified

Pinyin

Gloss

人

—

rén

human

女

—

nǚ

female human

子

—

zǐ

child

日

—

rì

sun

月

—

yuè

moon

山

—

shān

mountain

川

—

chuān

river

水

—

shuǐ

water

雨

—

yǔ

rain

竹

—

zhú

bamboo

木

—

mù

tree

馬

马

mǎ

horse

鳥

鸟

niǎo

bird

龜

龟

guī

turtle

龍

龙

lóng

dragon

Most characters, however, are made by combining pictures, using one to give a general meaning, and the other to represent a sound. For instance, "媽 mā" (mom) is made by adding 女 (nǚ, human female) to 馬 (mǎ, horse). The "ma" part is only there to represent the sound.

In most dialects of ancient Chinese, one character is generally enough for one word, but spoken Mandarin uses mostly compounds like "媽媽 māma," which is just "mama,"

Other examples show different ways of combining components:

火車 huǒ chē (lit. fire vehicle) locomotive, train

大人 dà rén (lit. big person) adult

打開 dǎ kāi (lit. strike open) open up (door, window, envelope, etc.)

Just as the English used in Great Britain favors "petrol" but the English used in the United States almost always uses "gasoline," different regional languages in China may use different compound words to name the same thing.

In Spoken Mandarin, most words are character compounds because over time Mandarin lost many sounds that existed in earlier forms of Chinese. Due to the loss of sounds, many Chinese words ended up becoming homophones, thus more characters were added to words to tell them apart. For example, the Chinese title of the poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den 施氏食狮史 is pronounced "Shī Shì Shí Shī Shǐ", and every character in the poem is pronounced with the same syllable, but with different tones. In older forms of Chinese, one could have been to tell apart the different characters making up the title, as they could have sounded noticeably different from each other.

Thus, one-character words in Classical Chinese like

character

meaning

pinyin

狮

lion

shī

筷

chopstick(s)

kuài

金

gold/metal/money

jīn

became the Mandarin compound words

character

meaning

pinyin

狮子

lion

shīzi

筷子

chopstick(s)

kuàizi

金钱

money

jīnqián

to clearly distinguish such words from their homophones, otherwise the already mentioned characters could be mistaken for similar sounding characters like

character

meaning

pinyin

师

teacher/tutor/master

shī

快

fast/quick

kuài

今

now/the present

jīn

thus making spoken language difficult to understand without the compound words.

Mandarin is defined and designed based on Beijing accent. In China, there are over 600,000 dialects and more accents although they all use Chinese language and characters, but their pronunciation and some expressions are totally different. China must find a standard pronunciation to make all people to understand and communicate. Beijing has been the capital city of China for more than 1,000 years, so China defined Beijing Accent as standard mandarin.

Beijing also has some local dialects that are not included by mandarin or standard Chinese language yet. But different from the other dialects, Beijing is capital city, political, economic, culture and education center of China, more and more new Beijing dialects have been or will be accepted as mandarin or standard Chinese language. (But, the other dialects, such as Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hakka etc., have few opportunities to be included into Mandarin or standard Chinese language or be accepted by the whole of China.)